At orisev.com I present the gist of a radically new conceptualization of the modern firm based on my PhD thesis. I focus on structures and generalize processes, because whatever agents do in firms – understood to be complex open systems operating in equally complex, dynamically changing environments – is determined by the organizational format. Hence, organization is everything.
Sections one to seven guide you through the overall argument.

I take cooperation to be the paradigmatic behavioral trait as well as a generalized principle of viably efficient multi-agent interaction and novelty creation. I do not understand cooperation in some utopian, idealistic sense. Cooperation is a genetically manifested human behavioral trait and finds its analogous equivalent in evolutionary processes such as Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) and forms of symbiosis.

The core structural characteristic of self-organization is completely decentralized control and the absence of principal-agent hierarchies. Natural leaders, both male and female, automatically and freely emerge based on their skills and impact. Naturalistic precedents from star formation to the human brain demonstrate that complex systems of any kind require non-trivial self-organization to function viably and efficiently.

I hold that agents are not only intrinsically cooperative and altruistically help but also that they are creative as well as motivated to be productive. This implies, for instance, the cognitive ability to formulate shared goals and work towards their realization – whatever that goal may be (e.g. for-profit, non-profit, etc.). It also means that principal-agent hierarchic extrinsic control, coercion, and incentives are counterproductive, costly and, thus, sub-optimal.